Underexposed Video Enhancement via Perception-Driven Progressive Fusion

Underexposed video enhancement aims at revealing hidden details that are barely noticeable in LDR video frames with noise. Previous work typically relies on a single heuristic tone mapping curve to expand the dynamic range, which inevitably leads to uneven exposure and visual artifacts. In this paper, we present a novel approach for underexposed video enhancement using an efficient perception-driven progressive fusion. For an input underexposed video, we first remap each video frame using a series of tentative tone mapping curves to generate an multi-exposure image sequence that contains different exposed versions of the original video frame. Guided by some visual perception quality measures encoding the desirable exposed appearance, we locate all the best exposed regions from multi-exposure image sequences and then integrate them into a well-exposed video in a temporally consistent manner. Finally, we further perform an effective texture-preserving spatio-temporal filtering on this well-exposed video to obtain a high-quality noise-free result. Experimental results have shown that the enhanced video exhibits uniform exposure, brings out noticeable details, preserves temporal coherence, and avoids visual artifacts. Besides, we demonstrate applications of our approach to a set of problems including video dehazing, video denoising and HDR video reconstruction.